January 26, 2010

Changing direction on the new book

As you may know, I’ve been working on a new book called, “The Living Enterprise,” in collaboration with Mark Yolton, head of SAP’s community networks and Zia Yusuf, formerly EVP of SAP’s Ecosystem and Partner Group.

The original direction was to explore the SAP ecosystem and the role that its online communities play in making it work so well. It's a good story, but as I dug in I became increasingly aware that there are other good stories at other companies that I really want to cover as well. These include IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle as well as other companies and communities you may already know about that I want to learn about.

I have decided to write this new book independently of my co-authors. I continue to respect them and wish them well, but I am at my most comfortable as an independent writer and that is the course that I will pursue moving forward.

My new focus will be from an independent perspective, comparing and contrasting different communities and strategies; giving you ideas of options that may be useful to understand wherever it is that you work.

I will almost entirely talk about large companies and business-to-business strategies, perhaps as a contrast to Twitterville, which covered more small operations than large. Hopefully, it will give readers of the breadth and diversity of social media in business.

Mostly, as always, I will try to assemble some really useful and interesting stories. I remain convinced that the best way to tell business stories is not by putting a white paper between book covers, but by telling you about people; their struggles and dreams and how it impacts their work.

SAP will most certainly be part of my new book. It's a great story that tells you how one of the world's largest companies has figured out how to integrate social media into a modern enterprise to the benefit of its customers and partners as well as itself.

As always, I will crowd source as much of this book as I can. If you have a good story about an enterprise community, please share it with me. It can be favorable or unfavorable. What I am looking for is content that is will be useful or interesting to business readers.

If you have a good story lead, please leave a comment here or email me.

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Changing direction on the new book

As you may know, I’ve been working on a new book called, “The Living Enterprise,” in collaboration with Mark Yolton, head of SAP’s community networks and Zia Yusuf, formerly EVP of SAP’s Ecosystem and Partner Group.

The original direction was to explore the SAP ecosystem and the role that its online communities play in making it work so well. It's a good story, but as I dug in I became increasingly aware that there are other good stories at other companies that I really want to cover as well. These include IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle as well as other companies and communities you may already know about that I want to learn about.

I have decided to write this new book independently of my co-authors. I continue to respect them and wish them well, but I am at my most comfortable as an independent writer and that is the course that I will pursue moving forward.

My new focus will be from an independent perspective, comparing and contrasting different communities and strategies; giving you ideas of options that may be useful to understand wherever it is that you work.

I will almost entirely talk about large companies and business-to-business strategies, perhaps as a contrast to Twitterville, which covered more small operations than large. Hopefully, it will give readers of the breadth and diversity of social media in business.

Mostly, as always, I will try to assemble some really useful and interesting stories. I remain convinced that the best way to tell business stories is not by putting a white paper between book covers, but by telling you about people; their struggles and dreams and how it impacts their work.

SAP will most certainly be part of my new book. It's a great story that tells you how one of the world's largest companies has figured out how to integrate social media into a modern enterprise to the benefit of its customers and partners as well as itself.

As always, I will crowd source as much of this book as I can. If you have a good story about an enterprise community, please share it with me. It can be favorable or unfavorable. What I am looking for is content that is will be useful or interesting to business readers.

If you have a good story lead, please leave a comment here or email me.